ABSTRACT
Chapman comes at the head of a chapter on seventeenth-century poetry as a useful reminder that ‘fantastic’ is not a very distinctive title to apply to the poetry of Donne and his followers,—that if conceit and far-fetched similitudes are a sign of decadence, then Elizabethan poetry was born decadent, for from first to last it is, in Arnold’s phrase, ‘steeped in humours and fantasticality up to its very lips’.
